Ukraine expects two results from NATO summits and accepts no compromise – President's Office

Ukraine has shaped two specific expectations from the forthcoming NATO summit in Vilnius concerning Ukraine's membership in the Alliance and security guarantees, and it will insist on their implementation. At the GLOBSEC conference in the city of Kyiv, Ihor Zhovkva, Deputy Head of the President's Office of Ukraine has presented two parallel results Kyiv aims to attain at the meeting of NATO leaders in Vilnius in July. "We have every chance to achieve the decisions that are quite promising and important forvUkraine at the Vilnius summit.

This is political decision about the beginning of the procedure of invitation of Ukraine to the NATO membership and the decision about receiving security guarantees," he explained. Zhovkva remarked that the requirements to the decisions, which Ukraine deems acceptable, had been defined, and NATO is well aware of them, and Kyiv is not ready for a compromise.

"The level of the formulations Ukraine wants to receive in Vilnius, the so-called deliverables, is on the table of every leader of every NATO member country. Everyone knows about them and feels that Ukraine will insist on them until the last day before the summit," Zhovkva explained.

The detailed formulations of this document have not been disclosed but the overall contents are made public.

• Firstly, Ukraine insists that the algorithm of Sweden's and Finland's accession to NATO be applied, according to which the Alliance must officially accept Ukraine's "application for membership", submitted last autumn and assert that further accession procedure must be carried out with no interim stages like the Action Plan for NATO Membership (MAP).
• Secondly, Kyiv accepts the condition that despite immediate initiation of the accession procedure for Ukraine, it will not be fast. In this case different options are being considered, for instance, to call the current invitation "political" and postpone final approval of Ukraine's accession to NATO at the NATO summit in Washington in 2024, for example.
• Thirdly, it is suggested that the final decision about Ukraine's accession to NATO be approved "when safety conditions allow it", or when certain "guarantees" appear, restricting the influence of the Kremlin on Ukraine's future.

"Having in mind that the issue of NATO membership cannot be solved before Ukraine's victory, we wish that this process starts at the Vilnius summit, where Ukraine has all grounds to get an invitation for membership. The invitation is not equal to membership (and neither is application of Article 5, which stipulates collective defence if an Alliance member is attacked).

The example of Sweden and Finland proves this," Zhovkva added.

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During his address in the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council) of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called upon NATO to stop looking up to the Kremlin while making the decision about the future membership of Ukraine.

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